Recording gems back on the play-list after 100 years

 English Heritage has today (Wednesday, 22 July) launched one of its most amazing  ‘multi-media’ exhibitions at the 19th century mansion, near Doncaster, after new research revealed that the Hall’s record collection contains gems from the very earliest days of recording. 

Using a hi-tech `juke-box’, visitors will be able to select from a play list and hear historic and stirring renditions of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance from 1905 and an atmospheric recording by world-famous tenor, Enrico Caruso, circa 1910. 

The 98 strong record collection spans recording history and pop-pickers can even opt to hear Sandy Shaw’s 1967 Eurovision winning song, Puppet on a String!

Discovery of the collection

Jim Pattison, an English Heritage member from Glossop, Derbyshire, helped curators set the record straight after paying a visit to Brodsworth Hall with his wife, Joyce. 

A retired technical editor, he is also a classical singer, sound recordist and an enthusiast on recording history.  He was thrilled to spy a very rare label on one of the records displayed in a bedroom at Brodsworth Hall.  After an exchange of letters, curators invited him to help them re-catalogue the entire collection, uncovering recording milestones along the way.

Jim Pattison said: “I’m now 77 years old, but there were records at Brodsworth Hall that I’d only ever read about in magazines and books. Yet here they were in the flesh, so to speak. The early recordings by the likes of Caruso and soprano, Luisa Tetrazzini, date back to almost the dawn of the commercial record industry. Before the gramophone, you had to make your own entertainment.  But the technology meant that people of all social classes could hear the world’s greatest artists in their own living room.  The exhibition will give visitors a unique chance to hear these wonderful records again and learn more about their history.”

How the collection began

 The first records at Brodsworth were purchased by owner Charles Thellusson and played on a Monarch gramophone – sadly no longer surviving at the Hall.   Bought in 1902 for the princely sum of £22.50 and with a horn that extended 48 inches to amplify the dim sound of the original recording, it was a wonder of its age and the first `hi-tech’ step into the world of home entertainment.  Later Hall owners, the Grant Daltons, added to the collection, with Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and 1960s pop stars taking their place alongside the recording pioneers. 

Caroline Carr Whitworth, English Heritage Curator, said: “The Thellussons would have whiled away many an evening entertaining guests at Brodsworth with the newly developed gramophone.  Quite apart from the wonderful way these records revive the past, they are also quite beautiful items in their own right. They range from big 12-inch single-sided, 78rpm records to tiny 45rpm pop singles, covering genres from opera to big band music, film scores and pop.  The exhibition is a journey not just through the development of recording techniques, but through social and cultural history, right up to the swinging sixties.”

Listen to the recordings

For the exhibition, digital copies have been made from the original records by Jim Pattison.  Visitors will be able to hear 22 tracks playing as they walk through the  South Hall at Brodsworth – where the original Monarch gramophone was located.  They can listen to them again using an interactive display in the first floor exhibition room. Early recordings have been processed in a subtle way to retain their evocative sound. A reproduction 1910 gramophone will also be on show.

Early records are also on display, featuring beautiful labels which suggest that the concept of celebrity was alive and kicking long ago.  Top stars like Caruso were given pink labels to denote their superstar status, while Dame Nellie Melba was granted an exclusive mauve one.  Eventually a whole range of colours were introduced to mark an artist’s importance, all the way down to black for performers on the first rung of the ladder.  The Brodsworth collection also charts the evolution of the recording industry’s most famous logo – HMV’s Nipper the Dog, sitting in front of a gramophone, who made his ‘debut’ in 1910.